Revelation 14:12Meaning & Commentary from the Church Fathers

He says that sinners in the age to come will undergo eternal torments. But the saints, who have endured here in this swiftly passing age and have preserved unshaken faith in Christ, will rejoice.

"Here is the patience of the saints." It is revealed in those times of the antichrist and in that trial. For as great as the danger and affliction are, so great a patience is required.

Then the book seems to answer the question: Who are these whom you call holy and patient? They are those who keep the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus.

For when the hour of trials and death comes, such people will count everything secondary in comparison with faith and the love of God.

The Lord says: "He who endures to the end will be saved" (Mt 10:22). And the Apostle says: "You have need of patience" (Heb. 10:36).

So also in this place John says that the patience of the saints consists in enduring to the end and avoiding fellowship with the beast and the mark of his name.

Although the beast will rage, the saints do not grieve over temporary sufferings, which will be rewarded with eternal blessedness. Their persecutors, by contrast, after tasting a temporary triumph, will pay for it together with the beast by eternal torments.

"If anyone," says St. Andrew, "submits to the beast-like antichrist, takes part in his lawless life by word or deed, and proclaims him God, this may signify receiving the mark on the forehead and hand.

Such a one will share with him in drinking the cup of punishments. It is not mixed or diluted with the mercy of God, but mixed with various punishments because evil is manifold and many-shaped."

Divine grace, overshadowing the elect of God, will make the deceiver's deceptions ineffective for them, his threats unthreatening, and his wonders contemptible.

It will grant them courageously to confess the Savior who accomplished the salvation of men, and to expose the false messiah who has come to destroy men. It will raise them to scaffolds as to royal thrones, as to a wedding feast.

The perception of love for God is sweeter than the perception of life. So St. Isaac the Syrian says in Homily 38.

Just as the torments preceding death and accompanying death are the beginnings of eternal torments for the sinner, so torments for Christ and a violent death for Him are the beginning of the eternal joys of Paradise.